It seems hopes for overcoming of the Iranian-Azerbaijani relations crisis are doomed in the short term. It appeared that Azerbaijan wouldn’t be presented at the 16th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement which will take place on August 30-31 in Tehran. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said that the special envoy Yashar Aliyev would present the country at the session of the foreign ministries of the Non-Aligned Movement on August 28-29. At the summit Azerbaijan will be represented by the Foreign Minister Elmar Mamedyarov.
According to the official version, President Ilham Aliyev won’t participate in the summit, as in the same terms his visit to Belarus is planned. It is a clear signal to Tehran which sent the deputy Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Aragchi to Baku for decreasing tension few weeks earlier. However, Ilham Aliyev didn’t even meet Aragchi who had to persuade President to come to the summit.
Therefore, a meeting between Azerbaijani President and his Iranian colleague Mahmud Ahmadinejad won’t take place. Some analysts and even Iranian diplomats thought the meeting of presidents might be a crucial moment in the bilateral relations. Other experts warned: if the Iranian side doesn’t settle the case of two Azerbaijani poets arrested in Iran, Azerbaijani President won’t come to “negotiations with kidnappers” in Tehran. These predictions appear to be true.
Since the arrest of two Azerbaijani citizens, Farid Husein and Shakhriyar Gasdzhizade, in Iran two months have passed. There is no progress in their freeing. Moreover, after two sessions within the legal proceeding no clear accusations were stated to them. Vestnik Kavkaza has already reported that the arrested poets are “token money” in the bargain between Tehran and Baku: Iran probably wanted to return its arrested and sentenced to prison agencies. But it didn’t happen.
Along with “the special services wars” and the scandalous case of arrested Azerbaijani poets, there is another circumstance holding Azerbaijan from participation in the Tehran summit. The analyst of the Baku newspaper Mirror, Rauf Mirkadyrov, the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Tehran might turn into an anti-Western (precisely anti-American) show. The period of anti-Western views and attitudes in the Azerbaijani ruling elite passed long ago, economic and political cooperation between Azerbaijan and the West increase, and Baku might consider participation at the top level in this anti-Western arrangement to be unreasonable.
